ABSTRACT
A decade ago, high reliability researchers suggested that organizational interfaces are areas that pose a challenge for effective safety management (Bourrier, 2005). Outsourcing tasks to external contractors creates new interfaces that then require careful management to ensure worker safety is not jeopardized. Whilst contractor management has long been one area of focus in corporate safety management systems, the trend to outsourcing increases the importance of efforts to effectively manage relationships across the myriad of new organizational boundaries this mode of working creates. This paper describes our work on a tool to support contractor management in the aviation sector in the form of a safety culture maturity scale (after Parker et al., 2006) which addresses contractor relationships in some detail. The tool provides a series of questions covering five phases of contractor management (planning, capability assessment, post award, performance monitoring and contract close out). For each question, users are invited to choose what best describes their company’s systems and behaviours from short descriptions of five stages of organizational safety culture development (pathological, reactive, bureaucratic, proactive, generative). It is supported by an action plan which provides organizational advice on moving from one stage to the next. Drawing on high reliability theory, safety management system principles and interviews with airline and contractor personnel, the tool addresses organizations that seek to use contractor services in any form from specialist services to labour hire to project work. The aim is to assist in improving contractor relationships and as a result, contract worker safety, by allowing organizations to assess where their current practices fall on the scale and so what they might need to do to improve. The importance of better tools for contractor management is not confined to the aviation sector. This tool has broader application that we are seeking to test in a range of sectors.
